CANADA JOURNAL - Jan 13 - Beijing Kunlun Tech, which is run by billionaire Zhou Yahui, paid $93M for a 60% controlling stake in the company – a significant sum for what is Grindr's first outside investment. Zhou Yahui, is a relatively unknown name in the tech scene but has made a $2.8B fortune through free-to-play online videogames and an extremely successful IPO on Shenzhen's ChiNext stock exchange.

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 14 - Despite $61M in funding, Zoosk is laying off 1/3 of its staff. ~40 people will be let go. Founded in 2007, Zoosk found success by building extensions for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and Bebo. It reached 40M registered users and 12M actives by 2009. Zoosk made money by selling subscriptions. The dating app ditched its IPO plans in 2014, and its founders stepped down. Former CFO Kelly Steckelberg became CEO. "To operate as a sustainable, profitable and innovative company, we've made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our headcount", she commented.

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ChristianMingle Partners With World Vision

PRNEWSWIRE - Jan 15 - ChristianMingle will donate 50% of all new subscriptions confirmed through their "Do Something Amazing" landing page to World Vision from January 12 - February 14. World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization helping kids and families in poverty.

ACCESSWIRE - Jan 13 - The Grade's Apple Watch app enables users to have quick access to their matches and messages right from the wrist, including robust browsing and messaging functionality. The app also includes the use of the dictation feature, which enables speech to text functionality.

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 13 - Once, a dating app with ~600K users, announced an integration with Fitbit and Android Wear. Once lets users see their heart rate when they look at their matches. In the next version of the app, the user will be able to opt-in to a feature that will send their heart rate to their match once it's recorded. When you catch sight of your beloved and your heart starts racing, that's because of an adrenaline rush, said Dr. Reginald Ho, a cardiac electrophysiologist.

VANITYFAIR - Jan 13 - A glitch in the dating app Bumble was appearing to limit some adult users to only matching with users between the ages of 13 and 17. For several months, users have been reporting that they're stuck in an uncomfortable, illegal position. Whitney Wolfe, the app's founder said that that issue is a result of back-end confusion that has only impacted ~100 users. Wolfe and her team decided to ban all minors from using the app.

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One Big Thing Tinder CEO Sean Rad Says Everyone Gets Wrong

FAST COMPANY - Jan 13 - "People think Tinder went public and I'm a billionaire," says CEO Sean Rad. "Add it to the long list of &^%$#$^ that's misunderstood about me." When Match Group announced its plan for IPO, many articles made it sound like Tinder itself was going public. The reality is that Match Group is the majority shareholder of Tinder. The Match Group IPO doesn't really impact us," Rad explains.

FAST COMPANY - Jan 12 - Anyone who's used Tinder is assigned an internal rating: a score calculated by the company that ranks the most (and least) desirable people swiping on the service. The scores referred as "Elo Scores" are not available to the public. According to Tinder CEO Sean Rad, the rating is not a measure of attractiveness, but a measure of "desirability," in part because it's not determined simply by the profile photo. "It's not just how many people swipe right on you," Rad explains. "It's very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it."

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